was a Japanese poet, novelist and essayist. According to literary scholar Doug Slaymaker, Noma is widely credited with having discovered or invented the style of writing called by the term "postwar literature" (sengo bungaku) in Japan. Early life and wartime service Hiroshi Noma was born in Kōbe on February 23, 1915. His father worked as an electrician as well as a lay Buddhist priest. Among his early literary influences were the poet Takeuchi Katsutarō and French Symbolism. He entered Kyoto University in 1935, where he graduated in French literature in 1938. While attending university, he became active in Marxist student and labour movements, and later turned his attention also to the situation of the Burakumin. He was drafted into the Pacific War, stationed in the Philippines and northern China, and later spent time on charges of subversive thought in a military prison in Ōsaka. Literary career In the immediate postwar period, Noma became a member of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), which had achieved legal status under the U.S.-led occupation of Japan, and sought to produce literature that would support the cause of socialist revolution. He first received attention for his novel Dark Pictures (Kurai e, 1946), which was immediately hailed as a powerful work by an important new literary voice. Dark Pictures not only won praise from established literary critics, such as Ken Hirano, but also won the endorsement of the Communist Party thanks to its open embrace of Marxist ideology. Noma followed up Dark Pictures with other well-received works, including the short stories A Red Moon in Her Face (Kao no naka no akai tsuki, 1947) and Feeling of Disintegration (Hōkai kankaku, 1948), and the novel Zone of Emptiness (Shinkū chitai, 1952). A Red Moon in Her Face argued that "the war and defeat had made it impossible to form satisfying relationships to any other human being" (Van C. Gessel), while Zone of Emptiness was Noma's attempt to "provide the reader with a true picture of what my country was like when it was under the yoke of this dominating force [of militarism]" (Noma). Thanks to the prominence of these works, Noma has been canonized as one of the "first generation" of postwar writers in Japan, alongside the likes of Rinzō Shiina, Yutaka Haniya, Haruo Umezaki, and Taijun Takeda. Noma's focus on the human body in these works led him to be categorized as a leading exponent of